wildfires
by batlight16
Summary: Bruce Wayne had billions of dollars and elite ninjitsu training. John Blake has police academy training and a cave full of technology that he doesn't know how to use. …Good luck, John Blake.
1. john blake

Not for the first time, John Blake was glad that there was nobody waiting up for him to come home.

That was a common problem in being family of a police officer, spouse or parent or friend - there were shifts that stretched on hours past what they'd meant to, unexpected overtime without phone calls, hours that flexed in response to the rest of the city.

But he wasn't a cop anymore, was he? He was - something else, he wasn't sure what yet, the definition had not yet settled but he knew now, suddenly and completely, what the difference was between wanting badly to make a difference, and having the resources to actually do it.

The difference was behind the waterfall, at the coordinates that Bruce Wayne had left him. At first it had been nearly overwhelming, he had no idea what the hell half of this was but he knew that they were the things that you needed to make yourself more than a man, if you knew how to use them. Bruce Wayne had known, and he'd done it with a sort of precision and ferocity that he was still not sure that he could match - but he was not intimidated by the things in the cave, the monitors and weapons, the - it worked for him in some way, lit easily on dry tinder.

Most significant of all was the emptiness of the place - everybody knew that Batman was gone, had seen the news replay it a thousand times, the blinding light and the stillness following it, undisturbed by human life. Batman was dead, but John Blake was one of the only people who knew enough to separate the man from the persona, knew which part might still be out there somewhere - and he was the only person, the _only _person, who now had the capability to bring him back.

If anyone had been waiting up for him, they would have gotten very worried after the first eight hours. Even with the Bane's hold on Gotham finally broken, the city was still a very dangerous place, had become a place where disappearance was immediately cause for alarm.

But there was no one. He would have gone home to a dark apartment and silence, guns in the bedside table, blank walls without pictures - neat but sterile in a way, almost as if no one lived there at all, his apartment suffered from the long hours and overtime the way his wife might have if he had married. He stayed here instead, and there was a rare uncharacteristic wish for company - not for someone to fill up the seemingly endless space with chatter and warmth, but for someone to explain to him what all of this was, what all of it was for.

He'd been worried about the wall of monitors and safes within the caves, but everything that needed fingerprints opened for him without difficulty, and there was a paper neatly taped on the desktop with a series of passwords in the same boxy blue-inked hand that the cave coordinates had been written in. Everything seemed to be - ready for him, which stirred the same suspicions that had been chasing around his head for the past few days.

It didn't matter if they were true or not. Whether or not he was dead, Bruce Wayne was gone.

Batman, however, was another story.

It was easy to lose track of time in the cave, with no natural light and no reference of sun to tell him when he should be sleeping. He realized how long he had been down here only when his body started to let him know, brain clouding, fingers fumbling on the clasp of a gun case - not the best place to be slipping, it wouldn't do to die in a gun accident before he'd even started.

He found a bed, at the back of the cave, simple and spartan in design but he recognized the dense feel of memory foam when he laid down on it. He supposed that for a man like Bruce Wayne, moments of rest came few and far between, and it was important to make them as effective as possible.

Even if his mind was still moving a thousand miles an hour, his body recognized exhaustion. He was asleep quickly, and he didn't dream.

-

AN: Short intro-y chapter. Will have more very very soon!


	2. batman

John figured that he might never know Bruce Wayne's motivations for handing over the persona to him, but there were some things that made sense on a simple level. The city was a wreck, vicious and savage as a wounded animal, left hungry from the ideas that Bane had put in their mind and still trying to shake off the fear that had become a daily fact of life, had slowly seeped into their bones.

It was his job to fix it, he understood that clearly - and he knew the state of Gotham better than perhaps anyone else for several reasons. He'd been here the whole time, he'd been through it all, and he hadn't been hiding in his apartment with the door shut and the bolt thrown. He had been out on the street, pushing back - he knew his enemies because he had been fighting them for months, and now he could do it better, he had resources to back up his knowledge.

He knew where he should strike first - at least, he knew where he wanted to strike first, which might not be the same thing. He'd spent a lot of time in the past five months keeping his head down, of necessity - he'd been a lot more aggressive in moving against Bane and his thugs than most people had been, but had been only so much he could do.

He could do more now.

He'd let himself be seen - mostly at a distance, the suit and the cowl fit him well enough, and they made for a striking silhouette, and an unmistakable one. He was not interacting with people on a casual social level well enough to know if the rumors were spreading like he wanted. He did see it from time to time on the TV he had set to the news on as constant background noise on one of the monitors, trying to put together an idea of what state the city was in now that there was more widespread coverage of it, instead of a man-to-man game of telephone stringing through the boroughs.

It wasn't much - in fact, it was little enough to build some restlessness in him that was difficult to quiet, he wanted more, wanted to be doing more, possibly everything at once. He wanted to find Bane's lieutenants, the fanatics and convicts that were not likely to try to fade quietly into society. It was in their interest to keep Gotham in chaos, keep the crime rate up past so that they could keep the lifestyle they'd become accustomed to. He wanted to find them and put them down.

He wanted to find Jonathan Crane.

There had been horror stories about Crane's court since the first week after the city fell, twisted justice and murder run by a madman, cheered on by criminals lashing back against the legal and ordered court systems that had put them behind bars. He'd lost friends, dozens of them - in Crane's courts, being rich or being good, being a lawyer or law enforcement or anywhere in the system meant to keep these kinds of people at bay was a crime. Being disliked was a crime, fighting Bane was a crime, being caught was a crime. They would be pulling frozen bodies out of the river for a decade.

But the first time he really got involved was a mugging - he didn't know if Batman was supposed to get down in the details of criminal activity like that, but if Wayne didn't want him to be stopping muggers then he shouldn't have given him a listening device that picked them up. People like Crane and crime cartels didn't announce themselves that way, after all, and while he was listening for them he might as well stop someone getting hurt while he was less than a hundred feet away.

It was deceptively easy. The moment the mugger got a good look at who he was the blood drained out of his face, that was certainly gratifying though he still felt a bit like a child wearing his father's shoes. He didn't have to do much - the man tried to run, but he wasn't about to let that happen, knocked him out and cuffed him and told the woman who was already on her phone sobbing that she should let the police know he was here, and then she should leave.

Easy.

The second encounter was slightly less so. You could tell the difference between the desperate, the opportunists, and the hardened criminals, the ones who had come in with Bane or escaped through the prison wall when he blew it open. There were people who saw the lawlessness as a chance to take, or who took only because they had to - they folded easier, didn't have the violence in them like the people who'd chosen this long before the city had gone to hell. The second time he engaged people they were nastier, fought dirtier and had more practice at it, it was a great chance to find out exactly what the body armor was capable of taking.

Quite a bit, as it turned out, though he could feel the thinness of the armoring at the joints, he could tell already within a few times of wearing it where the weaknesses would be. When he followed the men he'd taken down back to their source, found a larger group of them and a man who seemed to be giving orders, he found out several more things about the suit - that it could take a bullet straight on, to the chest or any of the strongest parts of the armor without penetrating, it felt like being kicked in the chest by a horse but it didn't kill him, like had clearly been the intention.

The weak spots were exactly where he had anticipated they would be - a bullet to the chest was one thing, a bullet to the shoulder was another thing entirely. A couple of the rounds bit into the kevlar and didn't get through - one punctured straight through the joint weakness and into his shoulder, and then a second.

It was the first time that he had to pull back completely and focus on just getting out of there - whatever else this suit did, armored and protected, sliced bread, ordered pizza - it didn't seem to stop blood loss.

It wasn't the first time he'd been shot - but the time that he'd been shot before, he'd had police backup, a partner pulling him to safety and calling it in. It was the first time that he realized, sharply and with a clarity driven by the bullets in his shoulder and the pain pulsing through him heartbeat to heartbeat, was that he had no fallback for this kind of thing, no emergency contact. He couldn't even go to the hospital like this, because while gunshot wounds were commonplace in Gotham these days, state-of-the-art authentic Batsuits were not.

_Awfully short career you had there, John Blake._

-

He had not been planning for Commissioner Gordon to know about any of this. Gordon had been something of the Batman liaison in the time that Wayne had been working with the police force - unofficially, of course, but there had been a spotlight signal on the roof of the police department and a man who showed up to answer it. Everyone had known, and few criticized Gordon for it - the ones who did had been automatically suspect to Blake, as if disliking the proximity of Batman meant they had something to hide.

He hadn't decided yet whether he would try to contact the police department in any capacity whatsoever - his thoughts about the police right now were not entirely kind, he had thrown his badge off the edge of a bridge and turned in his gun to Gordon the day after, and he'd likely intended to leave it at that. This incarnation of Batman would not need the police; wasn't that the point?

Even if he had changed his mind, he would not have wanted his first contact with Commissioner Gordon to be leaning on his door because he couldn't stand up straight, hand pressed to a gun wound in his shoulder.

This was what you called _no other option_. Gordon might be aware that Batman was back, might not - might have some suspicions about who was it was, might not, but he was the only person who had any experience _working_ with Batman, and the only one who might not freak out finding him at his door. He knew that Gordon lived alone - another badly-kept secret, that the Commissioner's wife had taken their children and left, there was no concern about anyone else opening up the door.

Except that someone else did.

There were several confused thoughts about having the wrong house, or the wrong address, but he'd lost too much blood to do much about it, didn't move away from the redheaded girl or even speak, bracing himself against the open doorway with one hand and blinking at the spots in his vision. This was - not good. He'd come here because Gordon might be one of the only people who could help him, who he could trust not to betray him, but also because he hadn't been sure he could make it anywhere else. Trying to make it back to the cave now was out of the question, and the girl's voice sounded as if it were very far away and getting to him through interference, barely understandable even though he was so close to her.

"Holy _shit!_" He wanted to laugh, lightheaded and half-conscious as he was - it was an appropriate reaction, he had to give it to the girl. "Dad?" The first time it was drawn out and loud, she didn't take her eyes off him. "_Dad!_" The second time it was sharp and louder, meant to get attention but it couldn't snap him out of the slow blurred slide. The sound chased him into unconsciousness, echoing through his head as everything folded in on itself, and went black.

-

[[ Author's Note: Blending canons a bit in this and upcoming chapters, bear with me! ]]


	3. barbara

[[ AN: For those who have asked, I realize his full name is Robin John Blake, but since he goes by John Blake and thinks of himself that way, that's what I'm using! Also, thanks for all the feedback! I'm mostly writing this as I go, so it's great to hear back about what works/what doesn't/etc!

xxxxxxxxxxx

There was no slow wakeup and no blurred reality - he didn't get much of a chance to pretend that he had dreamed everything, and honestly, he would have been disappointed if he had. He wasn't wearing the suit anymore, but the gunshot wounds in his shoulder were there to immediately remind him that everything he remembered had in fact, happened - he remembered it all, in quick succession, up to the girl whose door he'd somehow mistakenly knocked on in his search for Commissioner Gordon.

Whoever she was, she'd clearly helped him despite his mistake - the shoulder was patched up, as well as could be expected though it still hurt badly the moment that he tried to move, and he could see the blood getting through the white bandages. He hadn't been unconscious for that long, then, not enough for it to significantly heal. Clearly long enough, though, for someone to get him out of the suit, which he already knew was a rather complicated process, had taken him almost an hour to get into before he'd gone out to -

What? Stop crime? Crime had stopped him, there was no mistaking that, had taken him down just as easily as he'd taken down that mugger in the alleyway.

He'd think about that all of that later. Right now, it was important to find out whose apartment he was in, and what they wanted. Knowing the identify of Batman was rather valuable currency in Gotham City - clearly she hadn't sold him out to any of the various criminal groups that would have wanted him, even though he wasn't Bruce Wayne. He didn't have to be, he looked the same behind the costume and it would seem that the reign of the city's dark knight had continued unbroken.

Except that the old Batman probably wouldn't have gotten himself shot by a couple of two-bit anarchists, Blake had to admit to himself wryly as he swung his feet over the side of the bed and pulled himself up with the help of the bedpost. His body didn't like that at all, it was disorienting and he found himself not entirely sure that he could stay on his feet. This set him back, that was certain - he knew how long it took a bullet wound to heal, let alone if he couldn't go to a hospital.

He could feel frustration grate inside of him like bone against bone.

He didn't get that long to dwell on it, though, because there was a knock in his door and then someone opening it before he'd even had a chance to give permission - this was their apartment anyway, _her_ apartment, the girl with the red hair who was stepping into the room now. "Morning, caped crusader," she said, smiling at him like someone who wasn't thinking about blackmailing him or betray him, but hell, you never knew with people these days. The unfamiliarity made him tense and waiting for the other shoe to drop, the pain made him paranoid. "Thought I heard you. You really should lay back down."

He compromised, sitting back down on the edge of the bed, still watching her very carefully as if he could pull her name and her motivations from just the way that she looked. She was wearing glasses and her clothes were unremarkable, jeans and a black cotton t-shirt, but hair very was bright against her pale skin, contrasting and primary in a way that he associated with silver screen film stars. She was pretty, he recognized that in a way that was submerged completely by the pain except to get him wondering if she was the one who had taken his shirt off and gotten him into the pants that he was wearing now.

There was something familiar about her as well, which made him uneasy mostly in that he couldn't pinpoint it - but his head was swimming and his shoulder was throbbing and he'd be shocked if he could find the side of a barn right now. "Who are you?" There were a hundred questions that refused to prioritize or neaten themselves in his head, and that was simply the one that got out first.

"Barbara," she told him, smiling again in place of more that she could likely say, and wasn't. "What about you, do you have a preferred cryptic pseudonym or should I just call you John?"

That almost got him up again, had him getting to his feet before she put her hand firmly on his uninjured shoulder and pushed, pressing him back down without violence, simple insistence. "Calm down, you're not in danger. My dad told me."

"Your dad?" The connection came a beat too slowly, frayed by injury and confusion. "...I think I missed your last name."

"Gordon," she said, and now he understood the smile, had all the information to do so or at least most of it. He laid back down again more willingly now, feeling some of the tension uncoil, feeling safer even though he'd walked away from Jim Gordon and his police force, had no right to consider him an ally.

"I didn't know he had a daughter your age."

"It's a long story," she told him. "By the way, he is _pissed_ at you. If you were his kid I would say he was going to ground you for a month. He might still try."

"Took out the vigilante identity without permission and didn't bring it back before curfew," he said - less intentionally cryptic than increasingly fuzzy, but he saw her arch her eyebrows. "It's a long story."

"Tell me someday." She reached out her other hand, indicating that he open his so that she could drop pills into it, eyebrows raising again when he didn't immediately reach for them. "Don't be stupid, you need rest. You're not going to get it without these."

He took them, pushing at the pills with his thumb for a moment, but they looked relatively innocent, vicodin or percocet or something of the sort. "What if someone tries to stab me in my sleep?"

"Stab them back."

xxxxxxxxxxx

He spent his next few days in a painkiller fog, broken up only by slowly sharpening pan when they were wearing off, and hands on him changing his bandages, bringing him food - Barbara became a pair of hands to him, efficient careful hands busy around his bed, and then occasionally there was a different, rougher set of hands and a more familiar face, framed by different glasses and a graying mustache. But those moments passed too, blurred easily and were gone quickly - Gordon worked long hours, he knew that already, and he was more than happy to postpone the conversation that Barbara had warned him about.

In the moments of clarity when he came down from the chemical peace the pain pills offered, he knew that he'd have to stop soon, he didn't want to be addicted to them, barely justified swallowing them at all, but the moment that he could sleep without them, he started refusing them - much more effectively this time despite Barbara's insistence, fought her on it and won this time, it was easier when he could actually string words together without being tripped up by medication or overwhelming pain.

It was after he stopped taking them that Jim Gordon let himself into the room with an expression that said before his words did that they needed to _talk. _

It turned out to be a very one-sided conversation - he was smart enough to shut up while Gordon demanded to know what the hell he was thinking, how he could be so stupid, and did he know what he was getting himself into? Hasn't he watched firsthand what had happened to the first person to put on that cape, did he think that this would be easy, or fun? If he wanted to make a difference, why didn't he come back to the force, where they were doing real work instead of skulking in shadows, in costumes and masks.

"Batman can do what the police can't," Blake told him, steadily, as soon as he had finished. These were principles that were decisive in his mind, decided long before this conversation and so the words were there when he reached for them. "Gotham needs him."

"You sound just like him," Gordon said, and it didn't sound like a compliment.

xxxxxxxxxxx

As soon as he stopped taking medication, he was restless. It built slowly but it did not stop or yield, built the need for action up in a body that wasn't capable of it right now. He listened to his police scanner even though both Jim and Barbara told him that he shouldn't, was only going to wind himself up. He got wound up, that was for sure, but he didn't really need any more motivation to go back out and keep at it the moment that he was physically able. The skill might be lacking, but the spirit was not, and every individual crime that he heard on the scanner became his responsibility, every person in the city and the city themselves, he took them on without hesitation. The motivation was not a problem, and if he didn't have the skill, he would learn it.

In his first year at the police academy, he'd been a terrible marksman - near the bottom of his class, had hit less than thirty percent of the targets the first time that he'd taken a mock test of the kind that was needed to be accepted into the force. Despite how clearly he had known that he wanted to be a policeman, and for how many years he'd known, he simply had never had access to guns and shooting ranges, he'd had to start from scratch - it had been matter of putting in time, a _lot_ of time, a lot of repetition. He didn't mind letting it consume his life, the things that were important to him were allowed.

By the time he'd graduated from the academy, he could hit seventy-three of seventy-five targets. He did not succeed through natural skill, but sheer stubbornness, the ability to take quite a beating without giving up. His father would say that was the Irish in him, but then again, his father had been shot for his stubborn mistakes, too.

But now he wanted to be something else when he grew up, had changed course again completely at twenty-six, and he [i]would[/i] succeed at it, he didn't have an alternate plan. He would succeed or nothing, he supposed, succeed or get shot or knifed and die. He recognized that persona came hand in hand with pain, with constant bruising, constant danger - it was much easier to see that on this side of the mask - but that did not mean he would repeat his mistakes. Blood and bullets were enough to teach him a strong lesson, and this would not happen again.

After two weeks, he started asking to be taken back to the cave. That came with its difficulties as well, he wasn't batting a very good average with the anonymous identity so far, but if he had to trust that to anyone, the Gordons were about as trustworthy as it got. They used to talk about that like it was an insult back at the station, _Jim Gordon would rather starve than take mob money, he'd rather sleep in a box in Hell's Kitchen with only his wife and his goddamn honor to keep him warm,_ the ways that guilty men twisted a virtue to ease the pressure of their own vice.

John Blake had not been one of those guilty men; those rumors and exaggerations had been the first thing that had drawn him to Gordon as an officer, and the thing that had brought him to his door two weeks ago. He thought he could trust Gordon with the location of the cave, though he made the mistake of talking to the wrong Gordon about it first.

Mostly it was because Barbara would not accept cabin fever as a legitimate reason to be moving around so early, and he had to explain to her that he was going to be able to do a lot more there than he was here. As he saw it, his primary task was still being Batman, but his secondary task was figuring out all of the bat-things stored away in the cave, and how to use them without anything blowing up. One of those two things he could still do, while all he was getting accomplished _here_ was folding laundry and crosswords and some very effective stewing.

To his surprise, she stopped fighting him on it in very short order and pointed out that he probably was going to have a lot more luck with the weaponry than he was the computers, he'd already admitted to her that wasn't his forte. He agreed, he'd known that already from what little he'd done with them, but it was difficult to see where she was going with that, until she mentioned casually, almost offhand, that she happened to be damn good with computers.

She brought him back, and would come by often enough to make sure that his shoulder wound wasn't going septic or anything, that was the deal, that was what they had agreed on.

There was something that he liked about watching her reaction to seeing the cave for the first time - he was sure his had been similar, it was hard not to be awed, even for someone as practical as Barbara. He'd never intended to bring _anyone_ back here, this was already off the map for him, but there were benefits already, it really did help to have someone to bounce thoughts off as he opened boxes containing things he didn't often recognize, and she'd done more with the computer system in fifteen minutes that he had in the entire time that he'd been here.

She still had to call him over from time to time for a fingerprint scan or a password, he'd memorized the neat handwritten note full of them and destroyed it, though he'd left the second note taped underneath it, the one reading "DON'T KILL ANYONE. DON'T DIE." in that same blue ink. When she called him over after she'd just barely gotten there for the day, he assumed that was what it was, she just needed something typed in or unlocked - but she kept talking to him before he got there, eyes glued on the screens and her voice taking on the tone that it had the first time that he'd met her, when he'd been bleeding out on her porch.

"John? I think you better come see this."


	4. bruce wayne

"John? I think you better come see this."

The tone of Barbara's voice had told him already that she was calling him over for something more than a fingerprint scan, but he didn't have a good idea of what until he crossed around behind her and saw the screen - which was a huge, frozen frame of Bruce Wayne's face, leaning in close, mouth open and clearly in the middle of speaking.

Wayne's presence was everywhere in the cave, all of this had been clearly made for _him, _to his specifications and the more Blake dug into it, the more he thought Wayne might be something of a genius. A crime-fighting, criminal-punching vigilante kind genus who jumped off roofs and sent planes out over the bay carrying nuclear weapons, but still.

Bruce's presence was here and would probably direct and define his own career, if only because he was using everything that Wayne had left behind. Even though he had given over to him with clear consent, he was in his suit and using his weapons, someday he might start to change and personalize all of that a little more, but for now the symbol was almost more important than the man behind it. At the same time, Wayne had clearly left the place for good, with no intention to ever come back, even if he was alive; his absence was felt just as much, and Blake certainly had not expected to see his face so abruptly, even if it was just a digital playback.

"It's, uh-" Barbara turned back to him when she heard his footsteps, eyes pulled back to the screen quickly though, tapping a single button on the console. "It's for you."

"…Right." It struck him too late that despite the fact that Barbara had a thoroughly inappropriately level of information about the current identity of Batman and all of the gadgets in the cave - he'd joked with her that if she decided to turn villain he would be completely fucked, but he had to trust someone, didn't he? Even if it was just one person, two people, a part of a family that had proved themselves trustworthy a hundred times over. But still - that was trusting Barbara with _his _identity, his secrets, he did not feel he had the right to trust her with Wayne's. That was a decision he deserved to make himself.

Too late now, probably. In the short time that he had known her, he'd already seen Barbara put together more with less information, Wayne in a video on these computers was likely all that she needed. Whoops.

He sort of hoped that Bruce Wayne never _did_ come back here, it would be very like parents coming back after vacation to find the house trashed, lamps broken and beer cans scattered on the floor.

She got out of the chair to let him sit down and press play himself, but she didn't leave - wouldn't have been much point anyway, there weren't really _rooms _in the cave, just vast space chiseled out of rock, and it echoed badly.

Still, he gave her a look as he settled into the chair - she gave him one right back. "Play is right there, John. You can find play, can't you?"

"I can find play." He reached out and tapped the button, admitted to himself that he would rather Barbara hear this, so he could at least talk to someone about instead of letting it just bounce around his own head, where things just seemed to become smaller.

The frame jumped out of its frozen suspension, and Bruce Wayne didn't smile at him, but looked straight at him. "-this, it means you followed the coordinates and keyed in the code to find it. No one else should be watching this but John Blake."

He exchanged guilty glances with Barbara, sliding back on the wheeled chair to reach up and put a hand over her eyes. She laughed, pushed it away - careful with his bad shoulder, she remembered to be more than he did. The laugh was good-natured but she was very intent on the screen, hadn't said a word about it yet.

"I've left you the Batcave as part of my last will and testament," video Bruce continued, not blinking at what 'last will and testament' implied - thoroughly alive and well, at least at the time the video had been recorded. "I think you know what that means. You can choose to accept or deny it. If you don't want this, I don't blame you. Please detonate at least the entrance if you do so. I'd prefer you destroy everything inside."

"If you choose to stay-" Wayne leaned forward, hands clasping in front of him. "-you are doing something very dangerous, and very brave. The city needs a protector - I'm no longer capable of being that. I think you might be."

It was different, following the breadcrumbs to this place and assuming so much, and seeing Wayne tell him himself, in his own words, that he had chosen him for this, out of everyone in the city - or at least, the people who were left and had all their limbs, which cut down on the possibilities somewhat.

He kept his eyes carefully on the screen, didn't turn to let Barbara see his reaction to that. It had been a long time since he'd had his father around to pull that kind of reaction out of him - after David Blake had died he'd discarded the need for approval altogether, had come to expect that nearly nobody was going to like the things that he did anyway and he wasn't going to change them to get that approval. He'd bent his attention on the approval of only his superiors, because that was important - on Gordon who he actually respected, and on men who were awful but he needed to work with nonetheless - and on some undefined shadow of a man who had been more an urban legend than a role model, but who was now speaking to him by name.

That was - he didn't know quite what that was, it uncurled something in the pit of his stomach but he ignored it, choosing to focus on the content of what Wayne was saying instead.

"I trained for years in martial arts," the video continued, and Blake heard a quiet, short _ha _kind of sound from Barbara over her shoulder, glanced back to see her expression some mix of incredulity and rapt attention. This was clearly all news to her, and once again Blake had to wonder if he should have brought her down here at all. "You will not have that to your advantage, unless there's something about you that I missed." He couldn't even bring himself to be insulted by that, it was true - at least in comparison to the speed and ability that he'd seen from Wayne. He considered himself a good hand-to-hand combatant, another thing that he'd succeeded in basically through sheer force of will, but it was clear to him that he was going to have to get better.

He could do that. "I've left a series of videos that will show you some basics to master, but your main advantage will be in the tech that I've gathered here. You need to become expert in its use, because most days it will be the difference between you living and dying."

"The rest of these videos are runthroughs of the things that are here - make sure you are completely comfortable with them before you using any of them as Batman, or you will still get yourself killed. If you have an emergency or need something you don't have, Lucius Fox at Wayne Enterprises has been arming me for years." There was a quiet _holy shit_ again behind him - he could understand the surprise, Wayne had done a damn good job with his secret identity - so much that just the idea of Bruce Wayne fighting crime almost seemed like too much of a leap. "He may or may not feel like doing the same for you. I'd advise against going this route unless you absolutely need to."

"Good luck. Be careful. I don't want to turn on the news and find out that Batman is dead."

The video ended, the frame freezing on Wayne's face yet again - there was a brief beat of silence, but he already knew that if Barbara had questions, she was not going to keep them quiet for long.

"Bruce Wayne?"

He had no idea what to say to that, there was no way to get around it, but this was not something that he had been prepared for her to know - just like everything else that she'd found out, honestly. Maybe he should start planning with the idea in mind that she was eventually going to figure out everything there was to know, it might work out better than it was now. "You tell anyone any of this, and I mean _any _of this-"

"Don't threaten me, John Blake," she said shortly, cutting through everything he'd just been about to say. "I can keep a secret."

He quieted for a moment, clicking back into the rows of thumbnails that meant video, wondering how long they would have been sitting here before he found them. "Where do you even tell people you go for a few hours a day?"

"Studying," she answered promptly. "Which, by the way, I'm actually going to do now, I need to check an assignment."

"I'm looking at these-"

"You have fourteen screens, John. I'll use this one over here on the side." Silence and clicking keys for another moment, both absorbed in their work, before she spoke again seemingly out of nowhere. "I can help you with hand-to-hand too, you know."

That got him looking over again, arching his eyebrows in a way that he'd picked up from her. "How's that?"

"How do you think?" She was still looking at her own screen, hadn't glanced back to meet his eyes. "I'm a black belt in judo, John. Unless you'd rather learn from home videos, in which case be my guest."

"You're a black belt _and _a forensic psychologist major?"

"And yet I still find time to help out your sorry ass," she said lightly, fingers tapping on keys behind him. "I expect I'll receive my application for sainthood any day."

"Patron saint of hero complexes," he answered absently, scrolling through the video descriptions, barely paying attention to the conversation anymore. This was a source of information that he hadn't thought he had, he had figured he was all on his own here and he had been all right with that. As it turned out, he was not quite as alone as he thought.

He had started to get absorbed in the videos again, but still when she didn't respond, he noticed it - glanced over at her just automatically to check, but his attention was caught immediately by the look on her face, struck and pale and fixed on her screen. "What?" She looked back at him but nothing seemed to register at all, her eyes were back to the screen and she didn't answer quickly enough. "Hey, what is it?" There were no images that he could pick up on, an email on a screen.

"I-" It still took her a moment to pull her eyes away, hand pressing briefly to her mouth. "My college. Someone torched the main building - three of the outbuildings caught on fire, accelerants…" She was scrolling down the page, reading each word with less and less inflection, tone dulling like shock. "They're gone."


	5. firefly

[[ AN: Okay this chapter got REALLY TALKY and I apologize. I promise I will blow a lot of things up next chapter. Possibly all the things. ]]

* * *

"You've never been down here?" It wasn't the kind of question John was looking for an answer for, simply surprised at what Jim Gordon had said and repeating it. "You're sure you've never been down here? You worked with him for, what, fifteen years?"

"I was down here once, and he blindfolded me," Gordon answered him - mostly occupied with looking around the cave, absorbing it all in a quieter way than his daughter had. "Bruce Wayne was a very secretive man."

"Blindfolded you." He should have thought of that. Maybe somewhere in those videos, Wayne had included a walkthrough on basic common sense.

"You know, I used to think Batman was a complete lunatic."

"Yeah?" He found the switch that raised the bridge easily this time, he was starting to get used to the place and that was probably all to the good - he hadn't bothered to renew the lease on his apartment, had been slowly moving all his things here but he'd leave some, maybe break some to encourage the assumption that it had been broken into, that he might have been one of any number of people killed during the occupation.

Bruce Wayne had done a double identity masterfully, but he wasn't sure he saw the need to do the same. The circumstances were different for him, he could disappear easily in a way that Wayne could not without being missed. He had no company to run and no social scene to attend to, the only institution that he'd been important to was the police department, and he'd walked away from that. "What do you think now?"

"I still think that he's a complete lunatic," Gordon answered wryly. "And that includes you, Blake. Anyone who's fool enough to put on a mask and jump off buildings. But I do think he serves a purpose," he admitted, though Blake didn't miss the choice of pronouns - 'him' not 'you'. "There are situations in which he can be useful. Such as now, when a souped-up homicidal arsonist is running around town with a flamethrower."

"No chance of a freak electrical accident or something, then?" He didn't know whether he had hoped it would be or not - he still was not entirely healed, he probably shouldn't be running around, but his mind had been ready for _weeks_, whether or not his body was.

"Oh, we already know who he is," Gordon assured him, stopping short of the actual reveal when they got to the other side of the lake and saw his daughter sitting at the console, typing intently. "Barbara, I thought you were in class."

"School burned down, dad," she reminded him, only pulling her eyes away after another moment to smile hello. "You were saying?"

"I'm afraid this is a bit above your clearance, sweetheart."

"I know John's first name and I carry an umbrella in my purse for getting into the secret cave hideout," she reminded him, and Blake could feel the discomfort and disapproval radiating off Jim Gordon - if he didn't want Barbara involved in this, he'd never said, but then again Blake had never asked. There was a feel of conversations that had happened between the two of them that he hadn't been around to hear, an ongoing argument. "My clearance is probably higher than yours."

"Hey, since when do you know my first name?" Not the most important thing that she had said there by far, but it still caught him out anyway, surprised him.

"I looked."

"Where the hell did you look? I haven't gone by that since I was-"

"Technically I was curious what your middle name was, but I found out this _is _your middle name. Why would you choose to go by John on _purpose? _That's like choosing to eat plain unflavored pasta noodles or something."

"Kids." He imagined that this was exactly the way that Jim Gordon used to talk to his family, that this had frequently been followed by _don't make me turn this car around. _Barbara responded, quieting down immediately and contentedly without any more comment. "Barbara, you can stay as long as you're not a distraction. I need to speak to Blake about what's happened at your school."

That changed her expression as well, got her jaw setting a little more and her head tilting back, focusing in that way that she could. "You said you know who did it," John prompted.

"He's an escaped convict from Gotham Penitentiary," Gordon said, sitting on the edge of the desk and folding his arms. "He had life in prison for malicious arson and manslaughter, and he's very dangerous. We have a liaison from the prisons who's been working with the department in rounding up all of the escaped convicts, Lyle Bolton - he recognized his methods immediately."

"Sure it's him?" He trusted Gordon's judgment, he'd been doing this a lot longer than he had, but he wanted to know every detail - fire was unpredictable, destructive, this was going to be difficult even if he had all the information he could. He wondered if there was a flameproof suit in here somewhere. "Anyone can start a fire. Lot of angry people in Gotham these days."

"It's him," Gordon confirmed, with a grimness that sharpened Blake's attention a little more. "He was clearly identified at the scene of the crime by multiple witnesses, Bolton was able to confirm the description that he gave. Relatively young man, blonde, - goes by 'Firefly', legal name Garfield Lynns."

The mention of the name was offhand, the last thing that Gordon said, but it hit with a disproportionate impact, shocking through Blake and stilling him completely for a moment. "Wait. Wait, wait. Garfield Lynns?" Father and daughter both looked back at him, surprised at the reaction, but he was barely speaking to them at all, thinking about North Gotham boys' home and matches on the concrete basketball court, an older boy with a flame cupped in the palm of his hand, protected. Lynns smoked cigarettes so he was cool, most of the younger kids had thought so, John had thought so. He talked back to the teachers and he played with lighters, ruffled John's hair and told him that he'd be a pilot when he grew up, an astronaut, a scientist, that he'd get out of this _goddamn sinkhole town _because he was smart.

Lynns had left an impression on him during that time, enough that the recall was instant now - but it was probably good that he'd just left one day, had completely disappeared. His influence on Blake could have made things much different if it had carried on longer, after Lynns had gone he slowly replaced his role models with people who worked in darkness, not flame, and he was better for it.

The thing that he remembered most about Lynns was that fire, and the way the home had been so relieved to be rid of him when he'd gone. Now there was a different kind of prison desperate to get him back, and he knew immediately that he would help, any background that they had aside. Batman didn't have any background with Lynns, after all, just John Blake - and perhaps he should have known, that someone like that was going to go bad, whose eyes were so dead except when reflecting fire and who talked to the people who helped him and cared for him with such hate.

People rarely made it out of Gotham's child services entirely intact, it was just a matter of the degree of damage, and what they did with it afterward.

He felt some degree of responsibility for what was happening here, as if somehow at the age of eleven he should have kept a better eyes on him, but the casualties of the college fire erased any sympathy he might have had. Eight dead, so many wounded, lungs filled up with smoke, public buildings burned. Anger burned coldly inside of him, didn't leap up and burn out quickly like fire - and perhaps that was at least one thing that he had in common with Bruce Wayne, what allowed that anger to fuel and propel instead of destroy.

"Yes," Gordon confirmed, after a moment of waiting to see if he would elaborate on that abrupt reaction. "Know him?"

"Long time ago," he said, and left it at that, shoulders rolling back, redirecting the conversation in a way that was anything but subtle. "Any leads as of now?"

"I'm afraid so. We got another lead on him this afternoon, a SWAT team was able to pin him down in front of a school." That seemed like the beginning of a positive story, but the tone of Gordon's voice told him it was headed elsewhere. "Three members of the team died. He got away."

"Eleven." Barbara had a way of disappearing into the background of a conversation, absorbing and making you forget that she was there until the moment that she spoke up again. Both men looked at her, neither understanding, and after a moment she explained. "Eight plus three. Eleven casualties, that's his running total."

"His running total is a lot more than that," Gordon told them. "This is a situation where we could use some help from Batman. Are you up to it?"

"Yes," he said, immediately, exactly simultaneously with Barbara's "No," their answers running together to make them barely understandable, and she looked at him as if he'd just sprouted an extra head.

"Batman has a healing gun wound in his shoulder," she reminded him. "Not the best time to go around chasing psychotic firebugs."

"I'm fine," he lied, which was he was not. "I'm not going to engage him or anything - I just want to find him before he lights up something else."

"And what are you going to do when you find him, if you're not going to engage?" she asked. "Give him a stern lecture to show him the error of his ways?"

"I'll think of something."

* * *

He had avoided a direct answer because there was none - or rather, because telling Barbara that he wasn't going to engage if he happened to come across Lynns about to light something on fire would have been a lie, and he'd never been good at lying.

In perfect honesty, though, that wasn't the ideal scenario at all - he was nearly healed but he'd still be at a disadvantage in any combat, and he'd had enough issues already when he'd had two good arms and no limitations. There was another thought that he hadn't spoken out loud, though, not because it was a lie but simply because it was stupid, and stupidly naive, it sounded that way even in his own mind, where he wasn't even letting the thought form completely.

Anytime it actually did start to coalesce, though, it was something like _maybe I can talk to him. _

Stupid. Growing up in a bad neighborhood with a lot of kids who had no future whatsoever to look forward to, it was understandable that he'd known a lot of people who had ended up on the wrong side of the law. It was much, much more likely that they would end up like that than that they would end up like him, the odds were drastically out of their favor. He knew the statistics; Lynns was not an exception, he was simply an exceptional case. _Maybe you can talk to the homicidal maniac, great plan, Blake._

There were other options, of course, like the tranquilizers he had with him, the net gun, the trip wires - using ranged weapons wasn't technically engaging, he had decided, though he hadn't shared that conclusion with anyone else. It was hard to feel like talking was an option after all, standing here at the scene of Lynns' latest firestorm, charred metal and the remains of what had been an auto garage. The fire had been much, much bigger than either of the previous ones, no doubt due to all the gasoline and rubber and everything that lit easily.

The police were long gone - there was police tape but that was easily gotten past, there was very little forensics work to do here considering that they already knew the culprit, and the cause. He blended well against the charred remains, black on black, but he probably wouldn't be here long either - the point was not to chase him, it was to head him off.

"John." The voice in his ear startled him, he still hadn't gotten used to communicating this way, at least when someone called you the phone rang to let you know. This was just Barbara suddenly there, talking to him as if she was standing right next to him.

"What?" A bit too loud, too startled, and he could hear her laugh at him.

"Don't worry, nothing serious. I'm working out the pattern of the fires here, I thought I should tell you what I found out."

"Can you tell me where he's headed next?" Theoretical was all well and good, but he got the feeling that she enjoyed that kind of thing a lot more than he did - he'd much rather have hard fact and coordinates any day.

"Not really. I'm not sure."

"Well hey, that is…not helpful at all. If you're getting lonely down there you could have just said."

"Shush. I mean I don't know where _specifically _he's going, but I think we can narrow down the field quite a bit." Now she had his attention, and he stepped inside the burned-out frame of the building so that he could stay still for a few moments and listen. "These places that he's burning down, they're all places that he has had connections to in the past. It doesn't take that long to see it once you start looking at his records, I'm sure someone in the police force has figured it out already. All you have to do is start working backwards through his file - the college he attended, the garage he worked at, the school…next target has to be something else that's connected to his history, I would say possibly another former job of his or somewhere that he lived, those are the next most -"

"_Fuck!"_

"_Jeez." _He heard her voice diminish, almost disappear for a few seconds, she'd clearly backed away from the mic in surprise and protest at his sudden outburst."_What?" _

"Nothing. _Fuck._" Not nothing at all, not in the slightest - he hadn't known any of Lynns' history after he had left the home, he couldn't have made that connection on his own, but now that Barbara brought it up it took him no time at all to make the next leap. "I have to go. Barbara, call the North Gotham Home for Boys on 22nd Street, tell them that they need to get everyone out now."

"You're not thinking of-"

"Trust me, Barbara, that's where he's headed. Call them now, call your dad. I won't do anything stupid, I promise. I have to go."


End file.
